The Killer (2023) - Movie Review

A new David Fincher film coming out is always cause for celebration. A new David Fincher film coming out after he scored another career highlight with Mank, more so. A new David Fincher film coming out with reuniting with writer Andrew Kevin Walker, the scribe behind his breakthrough work Se7en (and script doctor on his other crowning work Fight Club), even more so than that. Sure, I can’t say I was expecting this to entirely reach those same heights, but as someone who holds both creatives in such high esteem, I was definitely curious to see what a new team-up between them would look like. And in a lot of ways, it’s business as usual for the both of them, and in just as many, there’s something different going on here.

Spy Kids: Armageddon (2023) - Movie Review

Even before I recognised Robert Rodriguez’s name as a filmmaker, the Spy Kids series was the shit when I was a kid. The first one in particularly was largely responsible for me going through a major spy phase, getting a bunch of toy gadgets and playing mock action spy in the playground… alone… because goddamn, if you think reading my words as an adult makes me look awkward, kid-me was even worse. And the films themselves have held pretty damn well… okay, two of them have held up really well, with 3-D: Game Over having aged especially poorly thanks to the visuals and ugly-ass red-blue 3D, and All The Time In The World being just a categorical disaster that Rodriguez himself was basically strong-armed into doing thanks to Harvey Weinstein (a statement which itself has aged even worse than Game Over).

But even those films still held onto the unshakeable earnestness that RR approaches every production with. The way he wrapped up so many wrong-headed ideas in All The Time In The World with a genuine message about putting family first and doing right by your kids (made stronger by how he often makes films with his kids)… I mean, the film overall still sucks, but there’s no denying that he meant that shit.

Guy Ritchie's The Covenant (2023) - Movie Review

I haven’t been fair to Guy Ritchie. Hell, if we’re being honest, I haven’t been that fair to his ex Madonna either, given how I blamed her for Ritchie’s downturn after Snatch; that shit isn’t cool. And neither is how I’ve been framing Guy Ritchie’s films for as long as I’ve been looking at them on here. Having grown up with Snatch, I had a concrete idea in my mind that that is what Guy Ritchie was good at, viewing pretty much everything else that came after it as him trying to diversify into new areas and stepping out of his reach. While I still stand by some of that criticism of him making films that don’t fit his strengths (e.g. the Aladdin remake), thinking that he absolutely must keep making snarky Brit-hard comedic crime dramas for the rest of his career just isn’t reasonable. And it’s only with his latest that I finally got around to understanding that about the guy.

Ghosted (2023) - Movie Review

Films like this feel like practical jokes. Like, hey, there’s people out there who pay real close attention to the names attached to movies, so let’s bring a bunch of them together. We’ll get the guy who directed Rocketman, the writers of the Deadpool and MCU Spider-Man movies, and we’ll get Mindy Marin to work her usual magic and cast all kinds of hot acting talent for it, led by Chris Evans and Ana De Armas. Apparently, the strategy worked, as this set a new record for debut audience numbers on Apple TV+. Of course, first appearances aren’t everything, and it takes little more than a light breeze to scratch the paint off of this bafflingly awful product.

Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget (2023) - Movie Review

The idea of making a sequel to Aardman’s first feature has been floating around since that film initially came out, and considering modern trends towards legacy sequels and the like, it would make sense for them to attempt it around now. It helps that their last film, the Shaun The Sheep sequel, was bloomin’ fantastic and a high benchmark for a studio that’s already a legend in the industry. However, for both good and bad, this is quite a different clucker from the original.

Silent Night (2023) - Movie Review

John Woo, the action filmmaker that just about every other action film or even parodies of every other action film over the past forty years owes some artistic debt to, has returned to Hollywood. While his work State-side never really managed to reach the artistic heights of his heyday, as memetic as films like Face/Off and even Mission: Impossible 2 have become, I’m still calling this a moment of potential celebration because… well, it makes the most sense why 2023 would be the year that he would come back. In the same time frame that John Wick, a franchise that simply wouldn’t exist without John Woo’s iconic approach to action thrills, reached its creative apex with Chapter 4, getting more of that grandeur direct from the source is quite the offer.

The Out-Laws (2023) - Movie Review

Dammit, I knew that getting lucky with Murder Mystery 2 being kind of decent wasn’t going to last. Although honestly, I have some morbid appreciation for this because I didn’t even think they made American comedies like this any more. Both here and for my FilmInk work, I find myself regularly bringing up how modern US comedies seem to spend a lot of time just ad-libbing and riffing instead of actually moving the plot forward or doing anything interesting with the characters. Nowadays, most filmmakers have gotten it into their heads that comedy can help advance a story instead of just grinding it to a halt for little to no reason, but there are some brave little soldiers who are doing their best to keep that style alive.

Murder Mystery 2 (2023) - Movie Review

After the atrocity we dealt with yesterday, I’m in the mood to push my luck, much like a naïve man who just survived a shootout and is now under the impression that nothing can kill him. As such, knowing that even the depths of Happy Madison rarely reach the utter revulsion of Freelance, I’ll be spending today and tomorrow looking at the four HM releases that made it to Netflix.

Freelance (2023) - Movie Review

I’m not even going to lead into this with any kind of pre-amble: This is one of the worst films I have ever sat through. Even though we’ve still got a lot of films left to get through for 2023, I am absolutely certain that none of them will be worse than this. While I didn’t have the total out-of-body cringe experience with this that I did with Vacation 2015, the fact that I even thought to compare this with that should be a good indicator of just how fucking awful this thing is.

The Marvels (2023) - Movie Review

Judging the current state of the MCU, this film could go either way. And I’m not even factoring in the myriad of behind-the-scenes issues the franchise has run into in recent years, from Jonathan Majors going to court, to recurring audience fatigue from the extent of the MCU assembly line, to how said assembly line has grown so big that they are now running into the issue of losing in competition with themselves, given how the second season of Loki basically eclipsed this film’s release.

No, I’m just talking in regards to what Phase Five has already given us this year alone. On one hand, there’s Quantumania, a clearly derivative and bizarrely uninteresting entry that felt very made-by-committee. And on the other, there’s GOTG Vol. 3, which succeeds because it is the product of a singular vision, giving the overarching franchise a booster shot of individual creativity that seems to be increasingly lacking post-Phase Three. James Gunn isn’t the only auteur to work on the MCU (Taika Waititi, Ryan Coogler, and Sam Raimi definitely fit into that category), but Vol. 3 (in my opinion) benefited the most from having that kind of distinguishable artistic voice behind it. That Gunn has now jumped over to heading DC Films has been taken as a sign that the kind of identifiable uniqueness that Vol. 3 showed amongst its contemporaries isn’t likely to repeated by Marvel any time soon.

With all that in mind, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this. I mean, I liked the first Captain Marvel (although I’m starting to chalk that up to being familiar with Brie Larson as an actor long before that film became a talking point, which I’d wager a guess isn’t the case for the Johnny-hate-latelys that have been on her arse since), but I am also starting to run a bit ragged on the MCU myself. It’s been heading towards the continuity threshold for a while now, where everything is so interconnected that it can feel unapproachable unless you’ve done all the homework beforehand, this film being no different. Along with the first Captain Marvel, this also has ties to WandaVision, Ms. Marvel, Secret Invasion, and to a lesser extent Thor: Love And Thunder and Hawkeye. I’ll admit that I haven’t seen all of the lead-in material, and quite frankly I’ve felt less inclined to keep up with it all as the years go on, but I’m still willing to give this film a chance. And frankly, I’m glad I did.

The Wrath Of Becky (2023) - Movie Review

When I looked at Becky in 2020, it made for one of the more pleasant surprises in a year that desperately needed as many as it could muster. However, I can’t say I was expecting much else to come from it. So you can imagine how quickly I prioritised checking out its sequel once I discovered its existence. I mean, sure, it’s written and directed by the same duo behind The Open House, one of the most pointless Netflix originals in the history of the platform, but as I got into in that first review, a teenaged vigilante laying waste to neo-Nazis is a pretty damn difficult idea to fuck up. Even on accident, this should allow for some cathartic joy, and thankfully, it offers just that.

Expend4bles (2023) - Movie Review

2023 has been a really, really fucking good year for action movies. John Wick: Chapter 4, Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3, TMNT: Mutant Mayhem, Sisu, Dead Reckoning Part One, the new Dungeons & Dragons movie, even Transformers has really started to turn back around.

In light of all that, while it’s been a long-ass time since anyone paid any heed to the Expendables, it at least makes sense that the ultimate action team-up fantasy would get another crack during this time. The third film may have come woefully short of what the first two accomplished, but even that had its moments. Unfortunately, with this fourth instalment… can this even be called an Expendables movie at this point?

The Creator (2023) - Movie Review

2023, in all facets of the film industry, is likely to be remembered as ‘The Year Of AI’. Production-wise, Hollywood has seen a once-in-a-generation workers’ strike (partly) out of fears of artificial intelligence threatening the livelihood of creatives. Narratively, stories about the looming threat of replacement by machines have reached a point of relevance that, even considering sci-fi’s rich history of prescience, is still kind of bizarre to contemplate at this point in time. And on the critical side of things, it seems like every goddamn person who writes about movies has uttered some variation of “it’s as if an A.I./ChatGPT/an algorithm made/wrote this film” as a go-to criticism for films that feel assembly-line or generic. Yes, I resorted to this very thing during the year-end lists for 2022, but the extent to which it has since mushroomed into a genuine cliché is… getting kind of irritating.

At any rate, alongside films like Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1, The Creator feels like one of those emblematic releases that help define a year as a pop culture moment. That it’s one of a shrinking minority of tentpole sci-fi flicks that aren’t based on pre-existing material (directly, at least, but we’ll get to that…) adds to that battlefront mentality. What can I say, this is the kind of metanarrative shit I crave in media.

Retribution (2023) - Movie Review

 The decision to watch this movie was something of a desperation measure. At time of writing, I’m not only still dealing with the finale of the After series with After Everything, which even for that series is pretty damn bad, but also having watched the new Digimon movie the night before and… well, recovering from the realisation that a kids’ movie could turn out that badly. As such, even though Liam Neeson’s film career has been in a bit of a worrying place in recent years, I went into this knowing that it wasn’t going to some grand masterwork, but still hoping that it would least be better than the other shit I’ve seen over the past 24 hours. And thankfully, I can report that this film is actually not that bad.

Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken (2023) - Movie Review

This film feels like a course correction in the worst way possible. DreamWorks Animation, who have dealt with labels of ‘Disney/Pixar rip-off’ pretty much since their inception, have recently been making films that are not only really damn good, but good in a way that sidesteps any kind of association with other studios. The Trolls movies, The Bad Guys, Captain Underpants, How To Train Your Dragon, not to mention last year’s genuine artistic triumph with Puss In Boots: The Last Wish. Their reputation in the modern day is quite secure, far as I’m concerned… which is what makes their latest release so thoroughly disappointing.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023) - Movie Review

Looks like it’s time to start simping for Point Grey Pictures again. I can’t help it; I have yet to encounter a film under their banner that I don’t find some level of respect for. Even the likes of The Interview (easily the worst of their releases to date) had its moments, not to mention serving as a particularly bizarre little pop culture artifact as far as American-North Korean relations are concerned.

How To Blow Up A Pipeline (2023) - Movie Review

I get the feeling that, considering the subject matter of this review and… well, just take a look at the title for the bloody thing, I should probably try and cover my own arse by writing a notice saying, as explicitly as possible, that I do not condone the actions that are depicted in this film and I do not encourage anyone to re-enact them in real life. Y’know, just in case someone gets pissed off enough about what I think of a certain movie to go digging for dirt on me, and decides to quote-mine for anything that they consider wrongthink.

Of course, despite what most media would tell you about pacifists, I am not a coward. As much as my opinions and worldviews are subject to change over time (this blog is having its ten-year anniversary next month; I doubt that I’m even the same person I was ten months ago), I still stand by every word I’ve put down here, if for no other reason than they genuinely represent my understanding of things when I initially wrote them. What I’ve written here is no different.

Besides, if someone truly ends up being inspired by this review, or indeed by the film itself, to try and act out this particular narrative… that’s probably just a stray droplet of water on what was already a tree with deep roots.

Gran Turismo (2023) - Movie Review

Video game movies tend to come in two flavours. They’re either about video game characters in their separate video game world, or they’re about those characters making in their way into the ‘real world’. On both counts, studios have historically struggled with making such movies worthwhile, although with the recent successes of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Sonic The Hedgehog 2 (I specify the sequel because the original is still pretty naff), that tide has definitely been turning of late.

Meg 2: The Trench (2023) - Movie Review

Y’know, I questioned the point of making a big-budget B-movie like this back when the first Meg came out, but with the industry still recovering from the COVID shuffle, I especially question it now. Doubly so because of the director for this one: Ben Wheatley. While he has a storied history with out-there horror material (also helping to produce just plain weird shit like Aaaaaaah! and The Greasy Strangler), and he’s done a bit of pop work in the past like directing two episodes of Capaldi-era Doctor Who, I’m… still trying to figure out where this fits in his larger catalogue. And bear in mind that I managed to find something about his Rebecca remake that made sense, so it says something when I’m struggling with this one. Then again, there’s a lot about this film that I’m struggling with.

Sisu (2023) - Movie Review

2023 has already seen action cinema reach some amazing heights, from the high-art elevation of John Wick: Chapter 4, to the western shonen sports drama of Creed III, even the one-take shoot-out scene in Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3. So when a film like Sisu comes out, it can’t help but feel slight, even if that is somewhat by design. It is by and large as simple and straight-forward as an action flick gets: Man finds gold, Nazis find man, Nazis try and take gold, man makes them regret it.

It’s a 90-minute feature that is so lean, it’s possible that quite a bit of usable meat was thrown away in the attempt to remove all traces of fat from the cut. But then again, even if it is just a thin excuse to have our stoic action lead cut, shoot, and blow up Nazis for an hour and a half… well, there’s never not a good time for such things, right?